D&P21 - Good Morning, Midnight

by Reginald Hill

  “That’s how it’s looking.”

  “But that’s stupid!” she protested.

  He said, “Yes, I suppose it is, though I’d like to hear your reasons for saying so, Shirley.”

  She said, “Well, it’s like the Irish joke about the guy who found his wife in bed with his best friend and he drew out his gun and put it to his own head and said, “Right, this’ll show you.” The wife fell about laughing and he said, “I don’t know what you’re laughing at—you’re next!” I mean, what’s the point of Maciver killing himself to put one over on his stepmother? She’s still going to be alive and he’s going to be dead.”

  “You put it well,” he said. “And I like the analogous anecdote. But ask yourself, can you think of any circumstance which might render the concept less like an Irish joke?”

  Novello, whose classical education didn’t go much further than the acquaintance with church Latin inculcated by a Catholic upbringing, would have been baffled by reference to the Socratic elenchus, but after an initial resentment at being as she saw it patronized by the DCI and his little questions, she had come to recognize their serious intent was not just to show her the path, but make her take it herself. In other words he wasn’t trying to put her down by showing her what a clever clogs he was, he was teaching her to be a clever clogs too.

  She said slowly, “Fitting up Kay had to be an afterthought. He had to have another reason for killing himself, a real reason, not an Irish joke one.”

  “And, remembering he wasn’t a good Catholic, what might a real reason be?”

  She said, “That he was going to die anyway, but slower and with more pain.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

  He took out his phone and dialled the number of the Central Hospital and asked to be put through to Mr Chakravarty. After the usual obstacles which are put in the way of non-paying applicants who wish to talk directly to consultants, he got the great man’s secretary who was back in full Boycott mode.

  “Mr Chakravarty has already spoken to an officer this morning about Mr Maciver,” she said reprovingly. “And in any case he is a very busy man and I don’t know when he’ll be available.”

  “That’s fine,” said Pascoe. “I’d hate to interrupt his hospital work. Tell him I’ll be happy to interview him at his home, if he prefers. Oh, and by the way, tell him it’s not Mr Palinurus Maciver I want to talk about, but Miss Cressida Maciver.”

  He removed the phone from his ear and smiled at Novello. They were passing through Cothersley village now. There was something happening outside the Dog and Duck but the car was still moving too fast for him to make out what.

  “Sir,” said Novello. “I think someone’s trying to talk to you.”

  A small tinny voice was rising from his lap.

  “Really? Ever been to hospital, Shirley?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then you’ll know how much time you spend there sitting around, waiting for some godlike consultant to arrive. Sometimes the whirligig of time does indeed bring round his revenges.”

  Slowly he raised the phone and said, “Mr Chakravarty, how kind of you to spare me a moment.”

  The conversation lasted less than a minute.

  When it finished, Novello, marvelling that anyone could be so threatening while remaining so polite, said, “Wow.”

  “You got that, did you?” said Pascoe.

  “The poor bastard had an inoperable brain tumour. And Chakrawhatsit had been banging his sister. But I don’t see why this stopped him coming forward when he heard about the suicide.”

  “He might well have done so eventually, even though doctors are naturally reluctant to share their patients’ secrets. But he received a strong disincentive when Tom Lockridge approached him. You see, Lockridge must have explained to him that anything he could say about Maciver’s possibly diseased brain might be very useful in helping the widow overthrow his will. His mistake was to mention that, in the new will, Pal’s sister, Cressida, was one of the main beneficiaries. And the prospect of standing up in court and giving evidence for the plaintiff in a will dispute case involving Cress was not very attractive to our Mr Chakravarty.”

  “Because …?”

  “Because,” said Pascoe, “while one can see why the playwright said that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, I think that a woman scorned and then done out of a large sum of money by the same guy would be several times more furious.”

  Novello digested this.

  “So he’d dumped her and she wasn’t pleased?”

  “So my informant tells me.”

  That would be Mrs Pascoe, she guessed, but this time she was wise enough not to display her cleverness. A police car passed them heading towards Cothersley. It was moving at a fairly stately pace which, she felt, matched its inmates, whom she recognized as Jennison and Maycock.

  She said, “I reckon the wife will win the case.”

  “Why so?”

  “Because even though it makes a bit more sense, he must still have been off his trolley to try and set things up the way he did. He didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of getting away with it, did he? I mean, OK, you want revenge on somebody and you know you’re dying yourself, so why not just go round to their house and blow them away? You’ve got no worry about the consequences, have you?”

  “And that, you feel, would have better indicated that Maciver was of sound mind than doing it the way he chose?”

  Novello thought for a moment then said, “All right, probably not. But I still say it was a bloody stupid way of going about things.”

  “That depends,” said Pascoe, “on what he thought he was going about.”

  She thought this might be a prelude to another elenctic bout but instead he lapsed into a brooding silence allowing Novello to concentrate on trying to break whatever speed records existed for the journey from Cothersley to the station.

  Here Pascoe made straight for his office, leaving instructions that Wield was to be ushered straight in the moment he showed his face.

  While he waited, he went online and accessed the Ashur-Proffitt website to see if news of the Commission investigation had touched it yet.

  It hadn’t. There it was, as solid and impressive as Ozymandias’s statue must once have seemed, with its network of partners and subsidiaries stretching across the world. Junius, he recalled, had described it as a rat warren. The beasts could emerge anywhere and you’d have no idea where they went in.

  He checked to see if the Junius hyperlink was still in place. It was, or it had been renewed. He read through the newsletter again. Against the displayed might of the corporation it seemed like a puffball blown against behemoth. But there was a final paragraph that brought it right up to date. Junius rejoiced at news of the investigation. He drew a parallel with the Capone empire of extortion and racketeering back in the twenties, and forecast that the accountants might be able to do what the forces of law seemed powerless to do and bring the monster to book.

  Pascoe sat back, closed his eyes and brooded on the links, as yet intuited rather than educed, between this and Pal Maciver’s death.

  When he opened his eyes, Wield was standing before him.

  “Make my day, punk,” said Pascoe.

  The sergeant dropped a leather-bound diary stamped 1992 on to his desk.

  Pascoe looked at the volume but didn’t touch it. Later he might browse it at his leisure but when you had before you a man famed for his speed-reading and almost eidetic memory, it was silly not to take the short cut.

  “Sit down and give me the gist, Wieldy,” he said.

  “Jake Gallipot. Pal Senior hired him to help check out what was going on at Ash-Mac’s. He wanted an out-of-town PI for extra security, but he didn’t pick Jake with a pin. He knew him from a Masons’ meeting, knew he’d been a cop and that he was crooked enough to need to resign but clever enough not to get caught. He wanted someone who’d be willing to bend the law if necessary. He fixed it for J
ake to get taken on in the Ash-Mac Security section. Ex-cop, he had all the qualifications. And that gave him the chance to go poking around at night when everyone else was asleep. What old Pal suspected was that Ash-Mac’s was being used, either directly or sometimes as a staging post, for the export of material and machinery with military applications to countries on the sanctions list. At first Jake came up with some good stuff, memos, bills of lading—all circumstantial, but old Pal clearly felt he was close to discovering a smoking gun. But it was a long time coming and Pal got impatient. He’d sounded off to Tony Kafka a couple of times, trying to bluff an admission out of him by claiming he knew more than he did. All he got in reply was a polite warning that modern business was a much harder game than it had been in his day and he ought to be careful what he said. In the end, he decided he and Jake were getting nowhere alone and that was when he contacted the papers. His last entry was on the eve of his trip down to London. He was full of hope.”

  “Now let’s see,” said Pascoe, unearthing the old Maciver file. “He went down on the fifteenth of March, 1992, came back two days later. Kay and Helen flew to the States first thing next day. Pal Senior topped himself the day after that, the twentieth. Now, I assume he kept this diary hidden in his concealed cabinet in the study, which would explain why there were no entries for days he was in London. But you’d think when he came back he’d have wanted to scribble something about what happened down there.”

  “Perhaps he was just so disappointed at the reception he got that he didn’t feel up to it. Remember, he didn’t even feel able to write a proper suicide note.”

  “No, he didn’t. Anything about Kay and the children in the diary?”

  “No. He was obsessed by the firm, it seems. But I did notice something, could be owt or nowt. He mentioned a couple of meetings with a VAT investigator. Seems it was the business, not him personally, being investigated. And he seemed to have hopes that this might be a way to get at the new management if all else failed.”

  “The Al Capone technique,” mused Pascoe. “This VAT man, any name?”

  “No. But some initials: L.W. I had a word with Bowler. That guy Waverley he mentioned, friend of the bird lady, retired VAT inspector, his first name’s Laurence.”

  “Whom Lavinia Maciver met for the first time at Moscow House ten years ago when she showed him the green woodpeckers.”

  “No law against that,” said Wield.

  “Perhaps not. But it’s interesting, particularly as the bird lady says that the only times she’s visited her old home in the past decade have been connected with violent death.”

  Pascoe glanced at his watch and stood up. Abandoning Dalziel at the Hall had seemed an amusing idea at the time, but it was a joke to be enjoyed from a safe distance.

  “Bowler still out there?” he asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I think I’ll take a little trip out to see Miss Mac and, from the sound of it, I may need a guide!”

  7 • a load of bullshit

  After his attempt to close the gates on his exiting car had failed, Andy Dalziel went back into the big living room. Kay Kafka hadn’t moved.

  “Looks like it’s just thee and me, luv,” said Dalziel.

  “I’ve got no complaints,” she said, regarding him affectionately. “Your Mr Pascoe is a very pleasant man but there’s something … do you know Lamia?”

  “Would that be Lamia Shufflebottom, kept a disorderly house in Neep Street?”

  She smiled.

  “Keats’s poem. There’s a philosopher in it, Apollonius. He sees to the heart of things and by fixing his severe eye upon Lamia turns her from the beautiful woman who has seduced his star pupil back into the serpent she was. I think Mr Pascoe fancies himself as Apollonius.”

  “Waste of time, then, as you’re not a serpent. Are you?”

  “What do you think, Andy?”

  He shrugged.

  “All yon magic stuff’s way beyond a simple soul like me. Give me a decomposing head in a plant pot any day. I’ll just do a bit of ringing round, see if they’ve got a line on your man yet.”

  He took out his mobile and started making calls. She sat and watched, wondering, as often before, what to make of him. If you listened carefully to what he said, you started noticing juxtapositions which could be significant, or might simply be the product of your own over-subtlety. She liked the way he didn’t go out of the room to make his calls. If there were bad news, he was strong enough to give it to her upfront, and he believed she was strong enough so to take it.

  Or perhaps he wanted to observe her reaction to his reaction as he talked.

  “Nowt,” he said finally. “Which is good. But only ’cos it’s not bad. Could be he’s sitting on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic. Does he ever travel under another name?”

  “Why should he do that?”

  “Don’t know. Mebbe Kafka’s not his real name, just one he uses professionally, and his passport’s in his real name.”

  “What a curious idea.”

  “Why? He’s not Czech, is he? I mean, I know he’s Yank now, but he’s never struck me as very Middle Europe. Funny cheekbones, but they’re not Czech cheekbones.”

  “You’re very observant, Andy.”

  “You’ve noticed?” he said complacently. “Aye, well, I learned the hard way. When I were a young DC, I described someone as looking foreign and my boss tore a strip off me. ‘What the fuck use is that?’ he said. ‘It’s like saying you saw a vehicle and it looked like a car. You’d better start thinking in 3-D, lad, or you’re no fucking use to me.’”

  “Sure you weren’t talking to yourself, Andy?”

  “Eh? Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, I picked up a few tips from old Wally. Any road, you’ve not answered my question.”

  She said, “No. Kafka is the name on his passport. It was the name he got from his father.”

  “But mebbe not from his granddad?”

  “I don’t think he went back beyond one generation,” she said. “But that didn’t bother him. He was a good man, Andy. A good American. That was important to him.”

  “You said was. Twice.”

  “I know. The first time was a slip. The second time it felt true. Andy, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  “I thought you did,” he said. “Any particular reason?”

  “No. What reason could there be?”

  “Threatening phone calls. Nasty letters. Sinister strangers hanging around the garden. Or mebbe he’s just been acting odd lately.”

  “None of those. Just a feeling in my stomach. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Not unless it’s hunger,” he said. “Which reminds me, I’ve eaten nowt since breakfast and you look like you could do with something to keep your strength up. How about we raid your larder? Or I could take you down yon pub. I’ve only been in there once since they tarted it up.”

  “And it’s kind of you to offer to grit your teeth and brave the horrors again on my account,” she said, smiling. “But no thanks, Andy. Don’t worry about me. I’m not going to sit around here all day. I’ve promised Helen I’ll call in at the hospital.”

  “Means a lot to you, that lass, doesn’t she?”

  “Children are a gift from heaven, Andy. A very precious and fragile gift. I got mine twice. And now twice more.”

  “Perfect is she, then?”

  She laughed and said, “Don’t be silly. Love can be perfect but not people. In fact I’m beginning to get just a little worried about Helen. She seems to have difficulty contemplating any version of the future that doesn’t involve lying in a nice comfortable bed with nurses at her beck and call and people dropping by to tell her how wonderful she looks.”

  “Understandable. Twins is a pretty big stone to have dropped in your nice calm pool,” said Dalziel. “That husband of hers, he going to be a help or a hindrance?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You know, these PE guys, all brawn, not much brain,” he said. “I just wondered if
he were going to give her the kind of support she’ll likely need.”

  “Don’t worry about Jase,” she said firmly. “He’ll pull his weight. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just fix my face to meet the world.”

  She stood up.

  “Looks good enough to me,” he said. “You’ll need to drop me off somewhere. Them buggers have hijacked my car.”

  “My pleasure, Andy.”

  Twenty minutes later they were driving through Cothersley.

  “Hello,” said Dalziel. “What’s going off here?”

  On the green right in front of the pub reared what looked like a model of Great Gable, as if some gigantic mole had been at work under the earth. A police car was parked nearby and Constables Jennison and Maycock were standing there talking to what looked like a very unhappy man.

  Kay’s attention was focused on the other side of the green where several women were spectating from the entrance to the church hall.

  “Oh dear, the jumble sale,” she said. “I promised I’d look in. Do you mind, Andy?”

  She brought the car to a halt.

  Dalziel said, “Never mind about me, luv. I’ll get a lift with these lads. Bloody hell!”

  As he opened the door of the car the nature of the strange mountain was made manifest. It was potently ripe manure.

  Kay got out, her attention focused on the Church Hall rather than the steaming hillock. She started walking across the green. Dolly Upshott detached herself from the knot of watching women and came to meet her.

  “You OK?” she said.

  “Not sure. You?”

  “The same.”

  They regarded each other uncertainly for a moment then Kay said, “What’s happening over there?”

  “Someone ordered that pile of manure to be dumped in front of the pub,” said Dolly. “It’s the third odd thing that’s happened this week. Blue beer, then a bunch of pensioners turned up for a cut-price lunch. I know it’s incredible, but I’ve got a feeling that Pal might be behind it. He hated the Captain and he loved a joke.”

  “Yes, I do believe he did,” said Kay, sniffing the air. “Can’t be helping your sale much though.”